BinaryNights Forklift 2.0.3 review

A third party file manager for Mac that combines features from Finder with FTP

Jump to Section:

For

Against

Not always reliable

Some interface issues

This ForkLift update bills itself as the 'second coming of file management', aiming to cement the application in place as the premiere file manager for the Mac.

Unlike most of its rivals, such as Transmit, ForkLift slightly uneasily straddles the gap between FTP client and Finder, integrating ideas from both. Therefore, you can use ForkLift to connect to FTP, WebDav and S3 accounts, but the application also encourages you to use it as a dual-pane Finder replacement, even adding Finder-like Devices and Favorites sections to its sidebar.

ForkLift's feature-set is impressive and largely based around efficient workflow. Many new features are also matched by the latest Transmit mounting remote storage in Finder, a transfer queue, Quick Look integration – but it also has a couple of interesting unique features.

Tweak a preference setting and archives can be browsed like folders – handy for anyone who archives projects to ZIP.

New in ForkLift 2 is Stacks, virtual containers to which you drag files that can then be uploaded as one. These features are great and would be enough to recommend ForkLift outright if it wasn't for the performance issues we suffered throughout testing.

Speed-wise, ForkLift was typically fractionally faster than Transmit, but regrettably, reliability was a concern – we regularly suffered errors during uploads and downloads, regardless of how much we tweaked the settings; Transmit, by comparison, was fine with the exact same files and servers, so that's where our recommendation remains for now.